Henri Lefebvre quotes

Henri Lefebvre was a French philosopher and sociologist, renowned for his work on urban space and the critique of everyday life. His theories significantly influenced the fields of urban studies, geography, and Marxist thought. He is especially known for his concept of the "right to the city" and his seminal book "The Production of Space." Here are 17 of his quotes:

Appearance and reality [...] are not separated like oil and water in a vessel, but rather amalgamated like water and wine. To separate them, we must analyse them in the most 'classic' sense of the word: the elements of the mixture must be isolated.

Henri Lefebvre

Just as economic pressure from the base ... is able to modify the production of surplus value, so pressure grounded in spatial practice is alone capable of modifying the apportionment of that surplus value - i. e. the distribution of the portion of social surplus production allotted to society's collective 'interests', to so-called social services. Such grass-roots pressure, if it is to be effective in this regard, cannot be confined to attacking the state qua guardian of the 'general interest'. For this state, born of the hegemony of a class, has as one of its functions - and a more and more significant function - the organization of space, the regularization of its flows, the control of its networks. It devotes to these purposes a considerable part of global surplus value, of the surplus production assigned to the running of society.

Henri Lefebvre

Change life! 'Change society!' These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. ... new social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa.

Henri Lefebvre

Pressure from below must therefore also confront the state in its role as organiser of space, as the power that controls urbanization, the construction of buildings and spatial planning in general. The state defends class interests while simultaneously setting itself above society as a whole, and its ability to intervene in space can and must be turned back against it, by grass-roots opposition, in the form of counter-plans and counter-projects designed to thwart strategies, plans and programmes imposed from above.

Henri Lefebvre

The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labour to leisure.

Henri Lefebvre

Only a vast inventory of the elements of our culture - in other words of our consciousness of life - will enable us to see clearly.

Henri Lefebvre

The 'meaning' of life is not to be found in anything other than that life itself.

Henri Lefebvre

Everything great and splendid is founded on power and wealth.

Henri Lefebvre

Castles, palaces, cathedrals, fortresses, all speak in their various ways of the greatness and the strength of the people who built them and against whom they were built.

Henri Lefebvre

There is a kind of revolt, a kind of criticism of life, that implies and results in the acceptance of this life as the only one possible. As a direct consequence this attitude precludes any understanding of what is humanly possible.

Henri Lefebvre

It is through knowledge that the proletarian liberates himself and begins actively superseding his condition.

Henri Lefebvre

But it is equally possible to follow this link in another direction, taking real life as the point of departure in an investigation of how the ideas which express it and the forms of consciousness which reflect it emerge.

Henri Lefebvre

The method of Marx and Engels consists precisely in a search for the link which exists between what men think, desire, say and believe for themselves and what they are, what they do.

Henri Lefebvre

Socialism, when it attempts to predict or imagine the future (which Marx refused to do, since he conceived of a path, not a model), provides us merely with an improved form of labor.

Henri Lefebvre

The 'meaning' of life is not to be found in anything other than that life itself. It is within it, and there is nothing beyond that. 'Meaning' cannot spill over from being; it is the direction, the movement of being, and nothing more. The 'meaning' of a proletarian's life is to be found in that life itself: in its despair, or conversely in its movement towards freedom, if the proletarian participates in the life of the proletariat, and if that life involves continuous, day-to-day action (trade-union, political...).

Henri Lefebvre